Death and Dystopic Vision

Hollywood producers, directors, writers are full of fear. They are born and bred in a media environment full of fatalistic visions seething fear and paranoia. Most of them believe that no matter what, we are all doomed anyway. They completely understand M Night Shyamalan movie The Village because they live in that village.

History denies that we are doomed by any problem or conflict, since most great problems to date have been overcome, but Hollywood still holds to doom and nihilism like a dear but vampiric friend.

Jason always rises again, pinhead is indestructible, and all movies of the future are post-apocalyptic dystopic visions of anarchy and tyranny taken to extremes. (e.g. Soylent Green, Escape from New York, The Terminator, Logan’s Run, The Running Man, etc. – before you point out Star Wars I will remind you that wasn’t made in Hollywood, and Spielberg and Disney movies are not really Hollywood product either.)

Over time throughout the world everything has on average gotten better for all people. On average across all of the world today people are healthier, live longer lives, have more free time, and get better education. Yes, there are pitfalls, times and places when evil takes root and grows at times like now. Reason, liberty, technology, and common sense always overcome evil in the end and it’s not a fairy tale for it has happened time after time.

The Chechs in Prague in 1968 must have thought it was the end of all time, and for a few brave souls who loved freedom more than life it was. The remaining Chechs persisted, and over time evil wore away against the steady wash of free ideas from afar, and the evil of the Soviet Empire has since fallen to dust.

The trials of the murderous communists who created the killing fields of Cambodia had barely started when the perpetrators died. The Holocaust the Jews faced in Europe during the second world war was overcome by the might of righteous anger and freedom.

Given time and persistent opposition, not continuous appeasement, even radical and extreme Islam will fade. We must of course confront it – like the monster in the closet much of its myth will fade and the fear will go as the light of reason shines upon it.

Reason isn’t a tool Hollywood uses to light their visions, instead they illuminate their vision with inky dinks focused at the next car chase or semi-nude woman. This is a dangerous vision, one that presents a false America to the gullible across the globe, and one that savages the societal perceptions of our children. Dictators and tyrants world-wide are known for taking snippets from Hollywood movies and projecting them to their people as the “real America”.

To movie makers the exception is the rule so we have movies chock full of explosions, car chases, gunshots and murder aplenty, all set against a backdrop of bars, ghettos, gang-violence, and prisons. Parading through that are the evil protagonists, the bad guys; who almost invariably turn out to be the authorities, the government, or capitalist institutions we trust.

So when movies portray our government, our schools, our courts, and our institutions as the bad guys because Hollywood’s creative typists are too unimaginative or too fearful to use real protagonists, what’s the world to think? What do our children think?

Think on this: other than in movies and on TV, when was the last time you saw a gun drawn or pointed at someone in anger, much less fired? If you are an officer of the law or in the military then you might have, but if you are an average American it’s unlikely that you have seen such a thing in person. Think again: when have you seen a car blow up? When have you seen a car chase outside of the news or movies? When was the last time you saw a bad cop? Again, in Hollywood it’s the exception that rules.

A very long time ago I remember watching a movie that was a parody of teenage slasher horror movies. The only scenes from it that I remember are the ones where a bearded wild-eyed man would enter in from screen right and say in a sepulchral, knowing voice “We’re doomed. We are all doomed!” He makes this entrance several times in the movie, once even catching a speeding van in the rain while peddling furiously on a bicycle to utter his dire warning in a side window and each time he appeared it was ludicrously humorous.

That is how I think of the extreme left, the extreme right, and that is how I think of Hollywood. Underneath it all they think that we can’t defeat Terrorism, they believe that we are all doomed. They each want you to hide in their village, and let the evil in the woods tell us what to wear, what to think, whether that’s a color to avoid, or whether it’s a chador on all women. Underneath it all they think you have to be bad to defeat bad. They think you should worry about your own government, your neighbors, and everything else under the sun. Instead you should be enjoying life, and should be entertained with bright visions of our future rather than dark evil views of the worst case scenarios. It’s easier to write the latter, and harder to write the former – but it’s the former that is really closer to reality.

The right is exemplified by Ron Paul, he’s like that wild-eyed man peddling furiously just to tell us that no matter what we are all doomed. The left has settled down from their panicked days of 2006-2008 but even they still have their loons of doom.

It’s time to put the fear aside; we’ve had a full decade of doom and in reality the future is bright — but only if we put the fears, the wild eyes, and the hand wringing aside for reason.